(Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. Learn to take a joke; you’ll live longer.)
Waleed Hassan, a future Deputy Inspector General of Police (Operations), Karachi, was in tears this Friday over a Central Superior Services (CSS) exam of the elective subject of Gender Studies, which he felt had gone terribly.
“I completely blanked out about Germaine Greer’s seminal book,” said Hassan, who after successfully clearing his exams after all, will join the Police Service of Pakistan and, after graduating from the academy, will volunteer for a new Special Tactics-only career track instead of routine policing.
“And the MCQs, don’t get me started about the MCQs,” said a sobbing Hassan to a friend who had also appeared in the exam, around four years before Hassan is going to be selected to go on an international training program, in which he will train with the NYPD’s SWAT team and the US Army’s Green Berets; following stellar performance, before being sent to train with the British Special Air Service.
“I had left the Naomi Woolf part in choice and now I don’t even think I can even clear the exam,” he said while breaking down in front of everyone present at the cafeteria of his hostel, unaware that 10 years from now, he would have successfully neutralised an extremely dangerous standoff with terrorists at the Military College of Signals at Rawalpindi, the direction of his police commandos being praised in his Tamgha-e-Imtiaz award for its “precision of an engineer and the deftness of a surgeon.”
“This guy is a mess,” said Umair Warraich, sitting two tables away from Hassan at the cafeteria, to a friend.
“If he can’t even handle this slight bit of stress and pressure, then he shouldn’t be an officer at all.” “Except, maybe, be inducted into something really sleepy, like the Postal Service,” continued Warraich, thirty years before retiring from a career in the Postal Service.
